David and Chris mentioned last week that Rails 3.2.13 — the last security update — also contained some problematic regressions as well. We wanted to remind you to take a look at Rails 2.3.18 and 3.1.12 which also contain important security patches which you should review. Please take a look at the release announcement we link to in the show notes.

Stephen Ball details the ways in which he customizes IRB, for instance he monkey patched the Object class to add a method called interesting_method. This method filters out all the methods that come from the ancestor chain of an object, leaving only the public methods defined specifically on the current object, which when you think about it should be a Ruby default method. He shows a few more
Rails­specific customizations in his blog post, which you should look at.

If you’re a Ruby programmer, you have probably been asked this question before: “Why Ruby?”. Apparently, it’s something Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror & Stack Overflow fame) had to deal with when he released Discourse, his recent open­ source Ruby project. He wrote up a blog post about his decision to use Ruby after years of .NET development. So... if you’re curious about what’s so great about Ruby, give it a read.

Speaking of Jeff Attwood, the Discourse Ruby project Olivier mentioned prompted some interesting notes from Sam Saffron regarding how to optimize Rails and Ruby. The notes are pretty raw but they provide a very interesting look at how to tweak both Ruby and Rails for such a large projects.

Listener Ben Klang let us know about an interesting post by Justin Aiken on the MojoLingo blog detailing how to use the git bisect command to hunt down bugs in published gems. If you frequently need to find the last known “stable” state of a repository, this is a great tool.